Day: September 18, 2014

Recently I found myself planning a day at the Magic Kingdom and I was traveling with a friend who had never been to the Be Our Guest Restaurant. Since we were on the Quick Service dining plan and didn’t want to spend extra money when we had pre-paid for our meals, we decided to try out the FastPass+ option for Be Our Guest at lunch. I had heard about this opportunity from friends, but had never been able to take advantage of it myself.

There is not a whole lot of information out there from Disney directly as this is still considered to be a Beta test for the Be Our Guest FP+. So, I thought I’d share what information I have been able to glean from my own experience and from talking to others. Shortly after booking my resort package, I went to the website beourguestlunch.disney.go.com to start the Be Our Guest lunch reservation process. Before you do this though, make sure you have already setup an account on the My Disney Experience website and that you have linked your resort reservation to your profile. It is my understanding at this point that you need to have a resort reservation to be able to take advantage of this FastPass+.

When you go to the Be Our Guest lunch site initially, it will encourage you to sign in with your MDX, ABC or ESPN account login. If you do not already have an account, it will ask you to claim your resort reservation if it doesn’t automatically recognize it as linked. You must use the twelve digit confirmation number (not your package 3AB12345, etc.), if you do not have this, you can get it by calling Disney Resort Reservations or by logging in to your MDX account and you can see it on your MagicBand order screen. After you’ve entered your confirmation number and first and last name exactly as they appear on your resort reservation, you will be asked for your date of birth then click on submit in the lower right corner of the screen.

When you have signed in to your or account or created one and it has recognized you have a valid reservation at a Walt Disney World Resort, then you can start planning your Be Our Guest lunch by checking availability. Assuming you don’t already have plans, the only option will be to Select or Replace your FastPass+.

On the next screen you will be taken to a calendar of dates starting with your resort check in date for five days. You have the ability at this point to select a date for Be Our Guest from the first seven days of your vacation or up to a seventh day within your arrival date. If your stay is longer than seven days you will need to wait until the second day of your stay to have access to the eighth day of your trip and so on one day at a time. If you have multiple resort reservations, you can click on the calendar to the right of the date to change to later dates.

Once you’ve selected your date and determined there is a time available (be very aware there may not be availability and I also don’t have a definitive window on booking, but I’ve heard it changed recently to within 30 days), then you can proceed to confirm the guests in your party. It will always display all the guests in your room, but does have a disclaimer that you can reduce your party size upon arrival at the restaurant. On the next screen it will tell you if there are FP+ available at Be Our Guest for the day you’ve selected, or it will encourage you to select a different day.

From here, if there were availability, you would decide between Direct To Table where you order your menu items ahead of time, or Expedited Arrival, which acts pretty much like a FastPass, putting you in a different line, but you still order what you want when you arrive. Since we had an idea of what we wanted, we opted to order our meal ahead of time, and after giving you a total, you can choose to use the dining plan and it verifies what you’ve selected is covered. There are some Be Our Guest menu items you may find not on the Direct To Table option like the substitution of chicken instead of tuna on the nicoise salad. If you are wanting to modify your menu items or if you have any allergies, then I would suggest just opting for the Expedited Arrival.

I booked my resort stay on August 8th and within five days received an email invitation to the Be Our Guest FP+. It essentially went through the instructions and disclaimers for the Be Our Guest lunch. The email looked something like this:

The day of our reservation we checked it at the podium for Be Our Guest at the foot of the bridge to Beast’s castle. The cast member scanned one of our MagicBands with an ipad and pulled up our reservation. We arrived about five minutes before the end of our half hour window, but we were warned they were going through some enhancements so we may have a 15-20 minute wait. We were instructed to queue up on the left side of a rope dividing the bridge since we had FP+, which seemed to indicate the right side was for the remainder of the standby line, which was cutoff already for the day at 1:10pm.

After waiting just a few minutes, we were at the entrance to Be Our Guest and the CM there asked if we had pre-ordered or just done the expedited arrival. We told her we had ordered already and were escorted inside to the left side of the hallway with the suits of armor. Only a few minutes later we were at the next podium and the CM there confirmed that we had ordered and directed us to the next CM at the register. Despite having ordered our meals ahead we decided to add a separate order of the potato leek soup using a snack credit and they just rang this up as a different transaction. We scanned our MagicBand, put in our pin to pay using our dining credits and went off to find a table.

All in all from checking in with the first CM to when we were seated was about 15 minutes and our food arrived less than five minutes later for our meals and about another five minutes after that for the separate soup order. The CMs at Be Our Guest had no trouble finding us simply by our MagicBands, so I was very happy and our orders were all perfect. The meal went very smoothly, other than the unexpected enhancement, but this only probably added five to ten minutes to our day total.

Some things to know about the Be Our Guest FP+ is that it is a Beta test and neither resort nor dining reservations or the internet helpdesk have information about the test other than it exists. CMs have been instructed to direct guests to the website, which doesn’t have much more info in the FAQ, which I will include a link to here. The FP+ for Be Our Guest does not count as one of your three scheduled FP+ in advance per day. You are only able to schedule the FP+ once during your resort reservation. You can use dining entitlements, pay cash, credit card or room charge at the restaurant. If you cancel you will not be charged a cancellation fee, however they do ask that you cancel the reservation if you know that you are not going to be able to make it. Your reservation will not appear in your My Disney Experience account anywhere, nor will you receive an email confirmation of your booking. The only place to see your reservation is on the Be Our Guest Lunch website.

This is all subject to change as it is a test, but we enjoyed it and thought it was a nice way to save time while in the park enjoying other attractions. Have you done the Be Our Guest FastPass+ recently? What were your thoughts? Do you have any more questions about the test? If so, leave me a comment and I will do my best to find out the answer. Bon Appetit!